Sherman White, basketball player caught in point-shaving scandal, dies at 82; Don Chandler, kicker and punter with Packers and Giants, dies at 76

Sherman White, 82, a 1950s college basketball star at Long Island University who served jail time for point shaving, died Aug. 4 of congestive heart failure at his home in Piscataway, N.J., said his wife, Ellen.

The 6-foot-8 White was one of the nation's best college players for LIU in the late 1940s and led the nation in scoring in 1951 with more than 27 points per game.

White appeared destined for a successful NBA career, but he was arrested in 1951 for taking money to fix the outcomes of games.

Investigators found that between 1947 and 1950, 86 college games had been fixed and 32 players, including White and two teammates, were implicated. The scandal was centered in New York, where Madison Square Garden had college doubleheaders twice a week.

White played in basketball's minor leagues for a while, and went on to work for a liquor distributor in northern New Jersey and mentored youngsters in Newark and in his hometown of Englewood, N.J.

"If it weren't for the scandals," Anderson said in an interview for "City Dump," a 2001 HBO special, "the [New York] Knicks would have made White their territorial draft pick and the Knicks, not the Minneapolis Lakers, would have won all those NBA championships in the 1950s. White might have become the NBA's best player."

White's association with the point-shaving scandal "was the bane of his existence," his wife said. "It gnawed at him for all of his life, and that's why he tried so hard to work with so many young men."

Don Chandler

Kicker, punter with Packers, Giants

Don Chandler, 76, a kicker and punter who was part of four NFL championship teams with the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants, died Thursday in Tulsa, Okla. He had cancer.

Chandler played 12 NFL seasons, nine with the Giants and three with the Packers. He won an NFL championship with the Giants as a rookie in 1956, then three more with Vince Lombardi's Packers. In each of his three seasons with the Packers – 1965, '66, '67 — Chandler was the team's leading scorer.

His first season with the Packers was 1965, which ended with a title game victory over Cleveland. He also was part of victories in the first two Super Bowls, over Kansas City in January 1967 and over Oakland in January 1968. He made four field goals against the Raiders, sharing the record for most field goals in a Super Bowl with San Francisco's Ray Wersching.

One of Chandler's biggest moments came on Dec. 26, 1965, when he kicked a 25-yard field goal in overtime to send the Packers past the Baltimore Colts in the playoffs. Some of the Colts thought Chandler actually had missed an earlier 22-yarder that was ruled good, making the score 10-10. The kick sailed high above the upright, and the league made the goal posts taller the following season.

"You can't win if you don't have a kicker," former Green Bay quarterback Zeke Bratkowski told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "It wasn't called 'throw the ball' or 'run the ball.' It was called 'football.' He worked at it. It wasn't easy. Green Bay is cold. But he made so many clutch kicks."

Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1934, Chandler attended high school in Tulsa. The Giants drafted him in the fifth round out of the University of Florida, where he was a running back as well as a kicker.